Welcome to the third of a series of Blogs featuring 2017/2018 Masters projects on Education and Technology supervised at the UCL Knowledge Lab (partner and coordinator of iRead). Each of the projects featured has focused on a key research area of iRead.

Rita Elyanova

During my BA, I studied English, Politics and teaching skills in order to become a teacher, whilst applying my pedagogical and theoretical knowledge in diverse types of work experiences within the educational field. Swiftly, I acknowledged the positive influence technology can have on students, teaching and learning. Simultaneously, it became evident to me that there is a current gap within educational practice to use this potential and the advantages that technology can bring to the 21st educational environment. Aiming to contribute to a closure of this gap and advance my knowledge of strengths and weaknesses of the integration of technology in education, I pursued the MA in Education and Technology at UCL.

Problem addressed

Changing working and learning environments in the 21st century require learners to be self-regulated in their learning and one aspect that contributes to this is learners’ belief in their self-efficacy, which is their belief in what they can do and achieve. Educational practice should respond to the needs of students and a way of doing so is by using the opportunities provided by educational technology, such as gamification, which can increase a student’s engagement with a digital learning environment and therefore the domain knowledge. Looking at a specific gamification feature, namely digital badges, little information can be found on theoretical guidelines or frameworks of how to design digital badges to support self-efficacy, despite the fact that badges have had a positive influence on students’ self-efficacy, as previous research has shown.

Approach

The design-based research study iteratively developed design principles about the design of digital badges to strengthen the self-efficacy beliefs of students, which were applied to the design of the iRead eReader. The study was set in the context of struggling readers, to support their potential low self-efficacy and with that help them to improve in their reading skills.

Methods

During the research study, two groups of participants were included. A group of 3 primary school teachers, teaching in a dyslexia school in London took part in a focus group and a co-design workshop. The second group of participants were 5 children, who attended Year 5-6, having recognized reading difficulties and participated in one design session, a co-design workshop (see Figure below).

Key highlights of research

The developed design principles capture that digital badges aiming to strengthen the self-efficacy of struggling readers should:

Value the achievement of the overall end-goals within a digital learning environment in a differentiated manner.

Value personal achievements by displaying them in an easily accessible manner.

Acknowledge mastery experiences and encourage coping mechanisms with failure, by using attainable objectives for the student.

The learner has to be persuaded of his competences through social encouragement and critical reminders, which may encourage positive learning behaviours.

In the iRead project is developing a Reader app that scaffolds children to work on their reading skills through strategies (Work package 7). This project opens up a new opportunity for our design by exploring how digital badges may sit on top of the Reader to support a child’s self-efficacy.

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